Amid Deadly Israeli Crackdown on Gaza Protests, Chomsky Says U.S. Must End Support for “Murderers”
Democracy Now! July 30, 2018
▻https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/30/amid_deadly_israeli_crackdown_on_gaza
(...) NOAM CHOMSKY : The official program—official—was to keep Gaza on what was called a diet, barely enough to survive. Doesn’t look good if they all starve to death. Notice that this is occupied territory, as recognized by—even by the United States, everyone but Israel. So, here’s a population kept in a prison, in an occupied territory, fed a diet to keep them at bare survival, constantly used as a punching bag for what’s called—what calls itself the most moral army in the world, now reaching a point where within a couple years it will be uninhabitable, yes, and in addition to that you have sadistic acts like highly trained snipers killing a young Palestinian woman medic when she’s tending a patient, and what the doctor just described.
What do we do with it? We actually react to that. The United States has reacted. It’s reacted by very sharply cutting its funding to the one organization, UNRWA, U.N. organization, that keeps the population barely alive. That’s our response, along with, of course, overwhelming support for Israel, providing with the arms, diplomatic support and so on. One of the most extraordinary scandals, if that’s the right word, in the modern world.
Can we do something about it? Sure, of course we can. Gaza should be a thriving Mediterranean paradise. It has a wonderful location, has agricultural resources, could be marvelous beaches, fishing, sea resources, even has natural gas offshore, which it’s not being allowed to use. So there’s plenty that can be done. But we’ve—the U.S. has preferred, under repeated-administrations but much worse now, to, as usual, support the murderers.
(...)
AMY GOODMAN: And, Noam, the solution that you say that is very straightforward and simple?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Very straightforward. Live up to the terms of the November 2005 agreement. Allow Gaza to reconstruct. Open the entry points to Israel and Egypt. Rebuild the seaport that was smashed. Destroy the—rebuild the airport that Israel destroyed. Allow them to reconstruct the power plants. Let them become a flourishing Mediterranean site. And, of course, permit—remember that the famous Oslo Agreements required, explicitly, that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank be a unified territory and that its territorial integrity must be maintained. Israel and the United States reacted at once by separating them. OK? That’s not a law of nature, either. Palestinian national rights can be achieved, if the U.S., Israel are willing to accept that.